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Insuring the Next 400 Million in India: Why the Mutual Insurance Model Presents a Clear Path to Scale
COVID-19 has had a devastating impact on India’s healthcare system, causing challenges ranging from a lack of medical oxygen to limited hospital capacity. But as Payal Agarwal at Uplift Mutuals explains, the pandemic has also brought to light the inadequate insurance infrastructure in the country, which accounts for almost 18% of the world's population but only 1.72% of the global insurance market. She shares the results of a new report exploring the potential of mutual and cooperative insurance to close that gap in India, and discusses how this model can be scaled.
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- Finance, Health Care
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Understanding COVID-19’s Impact on PAYGo Solar: Data From a Pioneering Study Reveals Key Insights About the Sector’s Financial Sustainability
The COVID-19 pandemic has had an unprecedented impact on PAYGo solar, causing up to 23 million people and 600,000 enterprises to miss out on improved energy access. Drew Corbyn at GOGLA, Bill Gallery at IFC and Roan Borst at Triple Jump share the results of a first-of-its-kind study that measured the impact of the crisis on the sector’s financial performance, based on data collected from 13 PAYGo solar companies. They discuss what these findings mean for the industry as it works to emerge from the pandemic’s ongoing disruptions.
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- Coronavirus, Energy, Finance, Impact Assessment
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Improving Financial Solutions for Women Micro-Entrepreneurs: A Report Highlights Key Focus Areas for Microfinance Providers
The disproportionate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on women is well-established – and for women micro-entrepreneurs, these impacts are compounded by existing business, financial and household challenges. Brit Heiring at Kiva and Liz Larson at UNESCAP explore how microfinance institutions and other providers can design financial solutions that meet these entrepreneurs’ unique needs. They share data from a report that focuses on the realities facing women micro-entrepreneurs, and explore how financial service providers can effectively support them.
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- Finance
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NextBillion’s 2022 Reader and Guest Writer Survey: Share Your Views and Help Shape Our Coverage
As an open forum for the development through enterprise sector, almost all of NextBillion's content is guest written. That's why it's important for us to check in periodically with our writers and readers, to get a better sense of how well our coverage is suiting your needs – and what we could do better. To that end, we've put together a brief, six-question survey, and we invite both writers and readers to share your views. Your input will be highly valuable as we work to highlight the businesses, innovations, debates and leaders that are shaping the sector.
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- Agriculture, Coronavirus, Education, Energy, Environment, Finance, Health Care, Impact Assessment, Investing, Social Enterprise, Technology, WASH
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Announcing Our New Series: NextBillion’s Most Influential Articles
NextBillion runs our "Most Influential Articles" contest at the end of each year, in which we select 12 of our most-read articles from the previous year and invite readers to vote for their favorites. Since 2021 marked the 10th year of the contest, we're commemorating a full decade of thought-provoking analysis and opinion from entrepreneurs, investors, researchers and others in the emerging markets business and social enterprise sectors with a new series highlighting all of NextBillion’s Most Influential Articles from 2012 to today.
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- Agriculture, Coronavirus, Energy, Finance, Health Care, Impact Assessment, Investing, Social Enterprise, Technology
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Making Financial Health a Global Reality: Four Strategic Directions for Increasing Customer-Centricity and Business Growth
Financial service providers that focus on improving their customer experience report growing revenue and greater profits. Yet as Pallavi Dhakal, Ankita Singh and Neha Kumar at UNCDF’s Centre for Financial Health point out, despite some notable progress, the financial services sector still has far to go to achieve customer-centricity – particularly in emerging markets. They share in-depth research that explores how providers in these markets can become more customer-centric by prioritizing financial health in their business strategy.
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- Finance
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Savings-Led Digital Finance: The Dawn of a New Era?
The digital lending market surpassed $300 billion in 2020, with significant growth among emerging markets customers who access “instant loans” from their mobile phones. But according to Philip Acton and Finn Tiedemann at DreamStart Labs Inc., there are growing concerns about the risky practices used by some of these digital lenders. They argue that one solution may come from a new generation of “savings-led” digital finance apps that use clients' savings capacity as a proxy for their ability to repay loans – a development they describe as an important milestone in digital finance.
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- Finance, Technology
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Linking the Needs of Customers and Providers: A Framework for Effective Financial Health Measurement
Many financial service providers (FSPs) want to improve the financial health of their low-income users, but they often struggle to measure it. According to Nishant Kumar and Sonal Agrawal at Lakshya, one key challenge is that many FSPs don't see the business benefits of investing in financial health measurement. They share three principles that can help providers understand the distinct needs of different user groups, and develop a measurement methodology that links customers with interventions that impact their financial health – while boosting the FSPs' bottom line.
- Categories
- Finance, Impact Assessment
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